Paul is the Most Misunderstood Person in History

And they have been informed about you that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles the abandonment of Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or to live according to our customs.

Acts 21:21 (LEB)

People have been misrepresenting the Apostle Paul ever since his conversion on the road to Damascus. Early followers of Jesus accused Paul of teaching against Moses, and to this day, hyper-grace, the age of grace, and dispensationalism are all rooted in misunderstanding Paul, or claiming Paul came with a new message.

Colossians 2:16–23 (LEB): ¹⁶ Therefore do not let anyone judge you with reference to eating or drinking or participation in a feast or a new moon or a Sabbath, ¹⁷ which are a shadow of what is to come, but the reality is Christ. ¹⁸ Let no one condemn you, taking pleasure in humility and the worship of angels, going into detail about the things which he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind, ¹⁹ and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by the ligaments and sinews, grows with the growth of God.

²⁰ If you have died with Christ to the elemental spirits of the world, why do you submit to them as if living in the world? ²¹ “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch,” ²² which things are all meant for destruction by consuming according to human commandments and teachings, ²³ which things although they have, to be sure, an appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and humility and unsparing treatment of the body, do not have any value against the indulgence of the flesh.

As far back as the fourth century church father Tertullian, these verses from Paul have been used to teach that Christians should no longer concern themselves with the Sabbaths or Feast days of the Creator. These words are also used to “prove” that Christians no longer need to be concerned with the dietary instructions given to us in Leviticus.

Someone who holds to this belief system must view the laws given to Moses from God as “elemental spirits of the world” and “an appearance of self-made religion”. Is Paul really saying these things about the laws of God? I do not believe so. Martin Luther taught that the law of God actually is what Paul was saying and was equal to the “elements of the world”. The following is from the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology :

Even the law is reckoned as among the elements of the world (cf. the 1st person plur., vv. 3, 5) and hence is declared null and void. Thus “the elements of the world” cover all the things in which man places his trust apart from the living God revealed in Christ; they become his gods, and he becomes their slave (cf. Luther’s exposition of the First Commandment in the Large Catechism).

H. H.-Esser, “Στοιχεῖα,” ed. Lothar Coenen, Erich Beyreuther, and Hans Bietenhard, New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1986), 453.

Another view of the meaning of Paul’s words to the Colossians is that he was telling them not to let people discourage them from keeping the Sabbaths and to stay away from man-made religious rituals that would have been prominent in Colossae at the time. Paul had too high a regard of the law of God to be found comparing it to the elemental spirits of the world.

Romans 7:11–12 (LEB): ¹¹ For sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. ¹² So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

Can something like the law of God be bad and good at the same time? Paul told Timothy in one of his letters that the law had to be used lawfully. In another place in the letter to the Romans, Paul called the law spiritual. Something happens to a person spiritually when they submit themselves to the commandments of God; however, most of Christianity looks at God’s law with contempt. Paul has the same message as Jesus concerning the commandments and instructions of God.

Romans 2:26–29 (LEB): ²⁶ Therefore, if the uncircumcised person follows the requirements of the law, will not his uncircumcision be credited for circumcision? ²⁷ And the uncircumcised person by nature who carries out the law will judge you who, though provided with the precise written code and circumcision are a transgressor of the law. ²⁸ For the Jew is not one outwardly, nor is circumcision outwardly, in the flesh. ²⁹ But the Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter, whose praise is not from people but from God.

Jesus, or Yeshua in his Hebrew name, had a similar message to the Pharisees. He is speaking about all the traditions that were added to the Torah in these verses:

Mark 7:8–13 (LEB): ⁸ Abandoning the commandment of God, you hold fast to the tradition of men.” ⁹ And he said to them, “You splendidly ignore the commandment of God so that you can keep your tradition. ¹⁰ For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘The one who speaks evil of father or mother must certainly die.’ ¹¹ But you say, ‘If a man says to his father or to his mother, “Whatever benefit you would have received from me is corban” (that is, a gift to God), ¹² you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother, ¹³ thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and you do many similar things such as this.”

Christianity has made the Creator’s eternal command regarding the Sabbath void by changing it to a different day and requiring people to work on the Sabbath. Christianity has done this many ways with the commandments of God, just as the Jews had done, which Yeshua upbraided in Mark 7. Many times it is Paul that is misquoted to enable people to “make the commandment of God void”.

We could write a book of the discrepancies in the writings of Paul that make it look like he is telling Christians to ignore the law of God on one hand, yet praising it on the other hand. There are many theories that have been brought forth over the centuries as to why Paul appears to contradict himself so much. This phenomenon is as old as the first century, so much so, Peter addressed the issue.

2 Peter 3:14–18 (LEB): ¹⁴ Therefore, dear friends, because you are waiting for these things, make every effort to be found at peace, spotless and unblemished in him. ¹⁵ And regard the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as also our dear brother Paul wrote to you, according to the wisdom that was given to him, ¹⁶ as he does also in all his letters, speaking in them about these things, in which there are some things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, as they also do the rest of the scriptures. ¹⁷ Therefore, dear friends, because you know this beforehand, guard yourselves so that you do not lose your own safe position because you have been led away by the error of lawless persons. ¹⁸ But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen

These words penned by Peter should be the end of the discussion. Paul is confusing to the ignorant and unstable and they will try to lead people to the error of lawlessness. Peter is calling all of the church fathers, pastors, professors, scholars and priests who have used Paul to abandon the law of God over the last two thousand years ignorant and unstable. I do not know how else one could read this. I also know Paul’s point in all his letters is to explain that keeping written code will not save a person outside of having that code written on their heart by the Spirit through faith in the Messiah. There is more than that though.

We can believe anything we want to believe and we can make the scriptures say anything we want them to say, which has been proven by 2000 years of contradicting doctrine and over 40,000 sects of Christianity. Therefore, how does one know who to believe? What are we to do about this? It is not an enemy that has made religion this way nor ignorant, unstable, “brilliant” men of God. It is the Creator God, who called Himself Yod Heh Waw Heh when Moses asked, “Who shall I say sent me?”. The only way to understand “the Way” is to search for the God of Abraham with all your heart and existence. These are the people God is yearning for so much that he sent Yeshua to find them and make a way for the whole world to be saved. If a person finds the things of God (not man) detestable, then perhaps that is not a good place to be.

Deuteronomy 13 (LEB): 13 “If a prophet stands up in your midst or a dreamer of dreams and he gives to you a sign or wonder, ² and the sign or the wonder comes about that he spoke to you, saying, ‘Let us go after other gods (those whom you have not known), and let us serve them,’ ³ you must not listen to the words of that prophet or to that dreamer, for Yahweh your God is testing you to know whether you love Yahweh your God with all of your heart and with all of your inner self. ⁴ You shall go after Yahweh your God, and him you shall revere, and his commandment you shall keep, and to his voice you shall listen, and him you shall serve, and to him you shall hold fast. ⁵ But that prophet or the dreamer of that dream shall be executed, for he spoke falsely about Yahweh your God, the one bringing you out from the land of Egypt and the one redeeming you from the house of slavery, in order to seduce you from the way that Yahweh your God commanded you to go in it; so in this way you shall purge the evil from your midst.

Following false doctrines and lawlessness is worshipping “false gods”. Paul has been transformed into a false god by Christianity. I believe he is confusing because anyone who wants to be lawless has ample materiel to convince themselves it is fine to abandon the commandments of God. Always be searching for the truth, and the truth is found in God’s commandments and statutes, hated by Christianity for hundreds of years.

Photo by Liviu Florescu on Unsplash.